🐣 R23X — TERRA_II

⌾ LISTEN TO R23X TERRA_II ⌾ Described as an "adventure to a long-forgotten space station/arcade orbiting the now-vacated planet once known as Earth," the two morsels of music that comprise R23X's latest release – Terra_II – act like a soundtrack to an imaginary videogame. They set the mood, induct you seamlessly into the world at the heart of this project.

The two parts to this single represent of the adventure to the eponymous space station/arcade: Terra_II. Partly summoning the steady pace of a space shuttle journey with its swaying march of layered beats, this track for the most part feels like walking around an abandoned space station.

There are the hollow synth boops that summon this sense of forlorn loneliness, the emptiness of robots with nothing to do—something once great rediscovered. But there's a cheerfulness to the coldness in the track: the two-chord vox sounds, the cut sample in the background, the videogame noises throughout that still erupt from the forgotten arcade machines.

But the last part of the track changes tack. Following a tiny break, where you feel the silence of creeping through a dripping tunnel to a new area on the station, the airy, analogue chords (conjuring the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VII) change dramatically. A now brooding, maybe more monstrous atmosphere hides in the hallways.

Part of the "mystery" at the heart of Terra_II as a whole.

'G.A.I.A. Probe' represents the (perhaps) discovery of something that might shed light on how the "thought-to-be destroyed space station has thrived and adapted in ways thought previously impossible."

It's just 54 seconds of sound, but for the duration of its series of rising, textured synth chords it shifts between beauty and decay, discovery and devastation. Synth vox suggests a hint of eerie humanity, no matter how long ago; the clinking bleeps ping a simple melody of inevitable but untimely shutdown.

Equal parts delicate and laden with the possibilities of space, shades of human emotion mingle with overtones of the sad uselessness of prodigious machines mired in neglect. In Terra_II, R23X marries with vivid colour and detail a scene of moody mystery with that strange lightness and gravity with which videogames consume and enthrall.

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• 🔔 Part of a project called EarthCade, created by R23X (Marc Junker) and Drew Wise (game developer, artist), which originally began as a game idea: "an exploration of bright and colourful animal characters who built a a self-sufficient arcade (The EarthCade) where everyone is welcome and included."

  Junker explains a little further. "We started the project with the idea of donating a portion of profits from every item sold to various charities (VOKRA, WCS, etc) that may prompt the audience (or their kids) to discuss/think about ways they can change/contribute for a better future on Earth!"

• 🔔 Terra_II is available now on Yetee Records, an offshoot of The Yetee, purveyor of art, apparel and more, where both Junker and Wise are both art directors. You can purchase Terrace_II on Bandcamp, if you like. And you can find more EarthCade products here.
• 🔔 We first stumbled across R23X in 2014. Check out the track that introduced us to R23X, 'Dry Summer'.

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📠
☟ R23X Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 POOL BOY — OLD DOG NO TRICKS

The first thing here is a sense of familiarity. Though it is new and from a new artist going by the name of Pool Boy, the bassline is a constant refrain of the first four beats of the bassline in 'Don't You Want Me' by The Human League. Intentionally, it is an innocent nod to something everybody knows. Unintentionally, it shows the pervasive nature of "classics" of the late 20th century. Either way, there it is; and 'Old Dog No Tricks' continues with a clatter of disco percussion, scathing hi-hats, cool lounge bongos, smart handclaps.

The heaviest element of the track is that bass. Above that close-quarters groove the feel is one of haze and otherworldliness. A constant fog of ethereal synth creeping across the floor; and above that a twinkling cluster of notes hangs in the air. Lead melodies spin like submerged guitar solos, muffled and wavering. Against this mirage of sound, like a disco in a dream, real world noises pour in: birdsong, fresh and innocent, and the wash-crash of the sea, expansive and farsighted—as with the musical elements, it is light and heavy combining.

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• 🔔 This appears courtesy of London label Coastal Haze as a single ahead of the Pool Boy LP, scheduled for release on 22nd January. You can pre-order it digitally or on cassette from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The description of the track reads: "Produced overlooking the port of Vancouver but ..who is Pool Boy?!" We have an inkling.

  1) The track itself was reposted by Cyril Hahn.
  2) One SoundCloud comment reads: "At last more music by Cyril!"
  3) Also he is Canadian, and it was produced in/near Vancouver.

  But we shall see.

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📠
☟ Pool Boy Internet Presence ☟
?????

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🐣 CYANURA — SPLASH

There is a wholesome realness in this track that makes it difficult to not bring your other senses along for the ride: skin tingles and warms, mouth and tongue seems to anticipate flavours and textures of tasty food, visions of a natural world elsewhere swirl like mists into your mind. Combining the sounds of outside, the sounds of nature with its luscious crunches and the inviting glory of water sloshing and soothing, combining these with the sounds of indoors, the ultimate indside sounds in the form of synths that bleep simple and videogame-esque or resonate rounded and glassy with artificial digital perfection, Vancouver musicmaker cyanura transports us to wherever we most associate these sounds, a lake shore, the ocean, a boat, a riverside, a tropical island—where there's water, there 'splash' is.

With a big emphasis on foley – that is, creating sound effects or in this case instruments by effectively sampling real life sounds – cyanura serves up a bustling collage of percussion that gives this song its rich textural dimensions, that all-senses effect where the clean clicks and clops tapping and popping in the track feel like different hard sweets: it is quite literally delicious. We have the crunch of footsteps, the dry shuffle of sheafing through pages of a book, reverbing finger clicks, distant hi-hats, tiny rolling snares—a percussive playground. It almost overshadows the beautiful plaintive melodies of the track, a modern day pastoral, the childlike nature of it summoning a deep sense of fun and nostalgia associated with fun and the places where it can be had. Idyllic is the word.

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• 🔔 This beautiful track is cyanura's first to be uploaded so keep an eye on their SoundCloud.

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📠
☟ cyanura Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ twitter

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PENDER STREET STEPPERS – THE GLASS CITY

This is a lovely and super delicious meal of music arriving courtesy of Vancouver-located production duo Jack Juston and Liam Butler, better known as the musical entity that they engineer and inhabit, Pender Street Steppers. It's called 'The Glass City' and usually with names such as this I'm just completely besotted with them because they conjure sceneries for the imagination that can then be soundtracked with the music once it's actually playing.

But I found out that "City of Glass" is a nickname for Vancouver (one of many, according to Wikipedia), coming from the title of a Douglas Coupland book of the same name, referring to the mainly steel-and-glass nature of the city's architecture.

BUT ENOUGH OF THIS.

The track itself 'The Glass City' is a not over-complicated yet totally bustling journey, moving along in a progressive fashion, picking up and dropping different elements as it slides glisteningly and blissfully along.

Organic drums with super-subtle delicate feather-touch hi-hats and punchy kicks, punctuated with the occasional muffled tom fill, are the foundation for the track, with plenty of percussion jumping in to add extra spice and flavour to the mix: güiros (or scrapers if you want) provide a flush of white-noise-esque insectoid chattering of humid crepuscularity, lassitudinal open hi-hat sounds shuffle with a sleepy-disco feel, gloriously crafted handclaps alternate with and lock into satisfying snare hits. It's all there.

Add to this the founding lounge-leaning chords of soft electronic piano, caressing your ears like sunlight on skin, syncopated spheroid bloops of synth bass, and slightly disorienting, seemingly directionless gentle rapid-fire horn sounds, and you've got yourself a winner of a track, something fit for the blissful afternoons of summer, and something very worthy of associated with that real-life El Dorado of chilled-out house music, Café del Mar. 8:46 minutes of understated rapture.

It arrives in vinyl form as a single on collective/label Mood Hut (of which Pender Street Steppers are a part). The B side is another very, very tasty number called 'Golden Garden' (place names again – name of a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver says Google), a slower track with a steady beat and a definitive groove in the form of bulging peals of bass, all of it veiled with ultra-chill soft synth chords, a 100% atmospheric flute fluttering in towards – listen to a snippet of that below.

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• You can buy 'The Glass City'/'Golden Garden' courtesy of Mood Hut.

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☟ Pender Street Steppers Social Media Presence ☟
• SoundCloud •

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JANETTE KING – DUSK

For a song called 'Dusk' to sound like actual dusk is, well, you'd kinda expect that to be the case. But somehow not as accurately as Janette King has done it. The track perfectly captures the stuttering fade-out of evening, the slow grudging descent into night as the air fills with twilit sounds, part unnervingly evocative of our mortality, part beautiful.

This is a grand piece of ambience crossed with off-kilter hip-hop style beats, following a seemingly arrhythmic pattern, with the fizzing punch of its snares and somehow urgently ticking hi-hats, pulverising kicks with that thud leaving poignant trails of dust having been disturbed.

All the while, piano plays in jazz slant, dark-world lounge bar melodies tinkling beside aching synth strings, squelchy bass underpinning this in no small part, with this fantastically stark BIP noise every now and again. What with the truncated synth solo at the end, a resonant, soulful snippet describing the sun hitting the horizon, throwing its last oranges and pinks across a serene and sea.

Janette King herself is a musicmaker from Vancouver, with an as-yet-unnamed EP apparently on its way. With stuff this good, it'll be nice to see what she's got in store for us next.

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☟ Janette King Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Instagram • Twitter • Tumblr

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EVY JANE – CLOSER [VIDEO]

This is the brand new video from Vancouver-dwelling Canadian duo, Evy Jane, comprising of Evelyn Jane, whose voice you will hear ghostly smooth throughout the track, and Jeremiah Klein, who provides the thicket of sounds through which you follow the vocals like faint lights in a pulsing gloomy forest. It's an awesome pairing, one which has seen a self-titled release on lovely Canadian label King Deluxe, and now one that has led them to London's Ninja Tune with an upcoming EP, Closer, from which this track is clearly taken.

I was hooked from the start: that rat-tat-tat on the snare & the instantaneous dive into this plunge pool of never-static sounds – it's always fluid, always in motion as if itching for action, as if in anticipation. The synths groan and intonate in languorous pitch bends as slow arpeggios fade in and out like patches of dappled sunlight through gnarled tree boughs; all the while the beat sways in slow-jam consideration, the languid metronome for this distorted subversion of R&B, where Evelyn herself is not a diva but a phantom of diva-essence, drawing you into the glowing mist of her voice.

A soaring yet sludgy post-R&B number, the video comes courtesy of Kyle Bowman, aka Strawberry Jacuzzis, whose vision for the track was one "seen through a kaleidoscopic lens of fuzzy hallucinogens". It fits the narcotic warpings and distortions at work in the music, lo-fi, garbled with static and uncontrollable glitching layers of itself. Beautiful, in tandem with the sounds.

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Like Evy Jane on Facebook
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Check Evy Jane on Tumblr
Watch Evy Jane on YouTube
Learn about Evy Jane on Wikipedia

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